[That kind of sounded like he'd fucked up. Just not in the way he'd been thinking. It sort of had been out of academic interest, if he was being honest, and then Ronan had said yes and things had snowballed from there.]

Are you going to punch me if I say it started out that way? I figured you were going to say you weren't interested, then you said yes, then I thought I'd made you uncomfortable.

[It really said something about how much he cared about Ronan that he genuinely worried about making him uncomfortable. He usually couldn't care less and sometimes even purposely made people uncomfortable.]

It wasn't a joke, I was-

[He made a vague gesture, at a loss for words. He hadn't meant to make Ronan feel like he'd done something wrong or like he'd made it weird.]